Guillotine Leagues: Week 4 Recap

I lost another Fanball team this week, but not the one I thought. I was worried about Team Bourgeoisie, where I started Jameis Winston, Miles Sanders, Dede Westbrook and Paul Richardson, and Team Sydney Carton, where I started Kirk Cousins, Carlos Hyde, Melvin Gordon, and Larry Fitzgerald. Thos teams survived.

I was not too worried about Team Mine is the Earth and All that Is in It, but I lost. Eulogy below. I was nervoud about QB Kirk Cousins, an emergency fill-in for Jimmy Garoppolo, who was on bye. But I figured my other players – including Alvon Kamara, Will Fuller, Stefon Diggs, and Tyler Lockett – were good enough to let me survive. Wrong I was.

Self-evaluation

Some moves that I made that I probably shouldn’t have:

Drafting a QB and top WR from the same team. I advised against doing this in my 7 Tactics for Drafting in Guillotine Leagues article, on the grounds that fantasy scoring between these two positions meaningfully correlate. But I did it anyway in this league. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking carefully enough while drafting, and only realized afterwards that I made this mistake.

To correct this mistake, I got Jimmy Garoppolo off waivers. Which was a good move given that I made the mistake with Cousins – it’s just that my team got eliminated on his bye. A better move would have been to get Daniel Jones, who went for 10 FAAB (I spent 16 on Jimmy).

This move hurt me: When I found out on the weekend that Rashaad Penny wasn’t going to start, I went to my bench for a replacement and found nobody there. I hadn’t worried about it during the week, because I did not take the injury concerns too seriously. When it came close to game time, it was too late to switch in my other RBs who had 1:00 games, T.J. Yeldon and Kenyan Drake. Not that either of them scored enough points to save me. This is a rookie mistake, which only happened because I’m in too many leagues and didn’t take the time to set rosters carefully. But there’s a hidden lesson here for Fanball guillotine leagues, which have shallow benches and do not allow free agent pickups: by Friday evening’s waiver deadline, make sure your bench can handle an unexpected injury. That might include taking injury rumors more seriously that you would in other leagues.

Bidding Report

Spending has cooled off (only 11 bids over $200), but even so, I think there’s significant overspending, including two bids over 700 and three over 600. Here are all the players in my seven leagues that went for $25 or more.

The spending will only cool more in the coming weeks. This week you could get deals like Juju for 113 and Mack for 88. In the coming weeks, there will be better and better deals, allowing you to improve your team for cheap.

Eulogy for Team Mine is the Earth and All that Is in It

In case you didn’t get the team name, it is a reference to the first two lines and last two lines of Rudyard Kipling’s great poem “If”: